She finished packing and hurried past me, and I said nothing and watched her go, filled with an emptiness very much like grief.
I slept in the spare room, not wanting to be reminded of the joy we had shared in the bedroom. She left a mess of clothes and possessions, which I did my best to straighten out and store away.
The following day, while tidying the bedroom, I came across a folder containing Laura’s bank statements.
I sat down and leafed through them, and discovered that for the past four months, at fortnightly intervals, she had withdrawn regular amounts of a thousand euros.
Idly I wondered what she had bought, on so frequent a basis. I had no idea, at the time – I found out only later.
I tried to paint, but found it impossible to concentrate. I was beset by waking nightmares. I thought about Laura’s addiction to Mem-erase, and where it might end.
She was systematically eradicating from her life all her experiences of pain, from major trauma like Ella’s death to much lesser incidents of hurt. I extrapolated the consequences of her actions and was filled with horror at my conclusions.
As she removed from her life all memory of one pain, then surely her ability to deal with pain in general – to learn from experience and grow, adapt to the agony of being alive – would diminish, so that her capability to work through trauma would become a relative process: as each pain was eradicated, so the next lesser pain would rush in to fill the vacuum of her life and become just as agonising and unbearable, as she would have no experience of real pain against which to measure it. So she would have this pain removed, and so on and so on... in a terrible reductionist cycle that would carve away, bit by bit, all her past experience, culminating in the whittling down of her humanity until only an empty, emotionless zombie stood in place of the woman who had been my wife.
I attempted to get through to Professor Enright, but was informed that he was away on a week’s holiday. I left my name and said that I would call back.
~
I attempted to find Laura and beg her to return. Life without her was hell. I wanted her back, even though she was not the woman I had married.
I contacted the university, her friends in town, but they had no idea where she was.
In the event, I found her quite by accident.
Unable to work, I walked into town one afternoon and decided to console myself in a quiet, olde worlde pub that served a blissful pint of Old Peculier.
I sat in the corner and drank, trying not to dwell on the future. The jukebox was playing something by the Eagles, and the twanging National guitar brought back memories of the days I had dated Laura.
I was on my third pint when I saw the woman across the room.
For a fraction of a second I had an objective view of her, as a stranger might have seen the woman: a straggle-haired, drawn-faced woman in her early forties, finding pathetic solace in a series of rum and blacks.
Then, with a sudden and wrenching realisation, I saw that it was Laura.
I picked up my pint and, to the plangent tones of a lead guitar solo, walked across to her.
Laura looked up. Almost winced.
I sat down across from her and said, “I’m missing you, Laura. Come back.”
She was silent for a long time. She looked dreadful. She had once told me, near to tears, that she had reached the age where her appearance needed constant renovation in order that she appear – in her own words – presentable. I had said that she was talking rubbish, that she would always be beautiful to me.
Now I saw what she meant. She had let herself go. Her hair was lank and greasy, her skin pale. Without make up, she looked half dead.
She said, in barely a whisper, “Why should I come back?”
“We had so much,” I began.
She screwed her eyes half-shut, as if to recall what we might have had together.
“Ed, it’s true what... what someone said. Who was it? Anyway, they said that we’re really only the aggregate of our experiences, and if we have no memory of those experiences... then we become nothing.”
“Laura... how much have you had erased?”
She raised a smile at that. “Don’t know. How could I? Maybe a lot. Whole areas of the past... they’re gone.” She smiled to herself.
I tried to take her hand on the table, but she pulled it away. “Laura. Come back. We can start again. It was wonderful, believe me.”
“Ed... it wouldn’t work. I don’t understand you anymore. The worlds we inhabit are very different now.”
“You mean, you’re different,” I said.
She stood up. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t go.”
“I need the loo.”
I watched her hurry along the warped timber passage. I stared at my pint, then drained it off and bought another.
I waited, and ten minutes must have elapsed before it dawned on me that she wasn’t coming back. I walked down the corridor. There was a rear door, next to the entrance to the women’s toilet.
I returned to my pint and drank.
~
The following day, hungover, in desperation, I rang the college and tried to get through to Professor Enright. A receptionist informed me that he was not at college, but at the offices of Neuro-Tech, and gave me his number.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” I said when I was put through.
“Who is this?”
I explained who I was, and what his Mem-erase process had done to my wife.
“Mr Carstairs, I assure you that I conducted only one session of strategic Mem-erase with your wife, specifically to removed the terrible memory of her loss.”
“You’re lying!” I yelled, and catalogued the list of experiences removed from Laura’s awareness.
“I’m sorry, but there is no way I can account for this. Please, if you’ll allow me a little time to investigate the matter...”
I replaced the receiver, wondering at his words.
An hour later, the phone rang. “Mr Carstairs, Professor Enright here. I’ve been looking into the case of your wife’s Mem-erase. I’ve uncovered certain, ah... shall we say, irregularities. If you would care to come over to Neuro-Tech and discuss the matter with me.”
I set off immediately and thirty minutes later parked outside a low, ultra-modern, glass-fronted building on a new science park to the west of the city.
A uniformed receptionist with the lock-jaw smile of an air-hostess showed me along a carpeted corridor to a minimalist, white-walled office.
Enright sat behind a desk shaped like an arrowhead, backed by a sheet-glass window overlooking a chamber busy with bearded techie-types. His donnish air was at odds with the spartan IT ambience of the place.
He shook my hand, then sat back and steepled his fingers, a look of concern spread across his usually unflappable features.
“Mr Carstairs,” he began, “I can fully appreciate your concern. It appears that, after the initial process of Mem-erase, your wife approached a junior research assistant and... this is where the irregularity occurred... paid the woman to conduct further – and might I say highly illegal – sessions to remove certain memories. Needless to say there will be a thorough investigation and the research assistant in question will be dismissed. There might even be grounds for criminal proceedings.”
I heard him out. At last I said, “That’s all very well, but the fact remains that my wife is, as you might imagine...” I went on to tell him of the person my wife had become.
He inclined his head. “I understand, but I can offer you hope.”
I stared at him, hardly daring to ask, “You can?”
“The Mem-erase process is reversible, Mr Carstairs. What is taken away can be replaced. All memories are stored. I have located the files that contain your wife’s missing life, as it were, and if she is willing then I see no reason why we cannot begin the restoration process immediately.”
I thanked him, and told him that I would be in contact, and left Neuro-Tech filled with hope and, at the same time, despair: for what chance would there be of persuading the woman my wife had become of taking on the burden of pain she had paid to jettison in the first place?
~
I scoured Oxford for my wife. In increasing desperation I asked at every pub in the city, leaving photographs of Laura and my phone number in case she appeared.
I spent hours driving through the busy streets, staring out at the guarded faces of so many strangers. I was close to a nervous breakdown, strung out, drinking more and more and getting little sleep.
I had never really realised, while I’d had Ella and Laura, how much my happiness had been dependent on the people I loved.
One evening, as I was halfway down a bottle of Calvados, the phone rang.
I picked it up. “Yes?”
No reply.
“Who is it?”
Silence – and then I made out a voice. Small, frightened. A croak. “Ed.”
“Christ, Laura? Is that Laura?”
“Ed, please help me.”
“Where are you?”
“I need your help!”
“I’m here! I’m coming!”
She began weeping. “Oh, Christ... what have I done?”
“Laura?”
“I came so close, Ed. So close to... to having you wiped! I contacted them yesterday. You see, it seemed that the only thing that was making me unhappy was the memory of you. All those years... the good times together. Your love.”
“Laura...”
“So I contacted Neuro-Tech. I wanted to wipe you. But they said... they told me that I couldn’t, that they couldn’t treat me.”
“Laura, listen to me. I saw Enright the other day. He told me that the process was reversible.”
“I know.”
The silence rang. “You know?”
“They told me. They wanted me to come in.” She paused, sobbing. “But, Ed, how can I have all the memories returned to me? I got rid of them for a reason, didn’t I? How could I live through Ella’s death again?”
I said, “It’s the only way. It’s the only way you can become the person you were.”
“I need your help. I rang you because...”
“Laura?”
“I don’t like the person I’ve become, Ed. But I’m not sure I’m strong enough to become the person I was.”
“Where are you? I’ll be right over.”
She told me and, despite the drink blurring my vision, I hurried out into the cold October night and drove across town to the grubby suburb of student bed-sits and take-away food franchises.
I parked the car outside the address Laura had given me, hurried up a front path littered with empty pizza boxes and buckled take-away trays and rapped on the door.
A young woman answered. “Yes?”
Ignoring her, I looked around an untidy front room, then made for the stairs and climbed them despite the girl’s protests. I came to a landing and counted three bedroom doors; two were open, the third closed. I approached the closed door and knocked.
Seconds later Laura said, “Ed?” and I almost wept with joy.
I pushed open the door, stepped inside and closed it behind me. A filthy room littered with old clothes and empty wine bottles...
Laura was sitting on the floor, the phone still cradled in her lap. Her eyes were swollen from crying, and she looked up at me with something like despair.
Then she said, “Ed?” in a tiny voice.
I stepped forward, reached out and pulled her to her feet. I held her. “There’s something I want to show you,” I whispered. I eased her from the bed and gestured around the room. “Do you need to take–?” I began.
She shook her head. “There’s nothing here I need.”
We drove home in silence, Laura gripping my thigh all the way. From time to time she cried, and it was all I could do to stop myself from breaking down as I concentrated on the road.
At home I helped her from the car and walked her through the house. In the bedroom I sat her on the bed and said, “Wait there. I won’t be a minute...”
Sniffing back her tears, she nodded, watching me with trusting, almost hopeful, eyes.
I found the step-ladders, removed the trap-door to the attic and reached inside.
I carried the box back to the bedroom and sat down beside my wife.
“What is it?”
“After the accident,” I said, “while you were still in hospital, I saved a few things belonging to...”
I opened the box with clumsy, trembling fingers, and the sight of what was inside drew a painful sob from deep within me.
“This was Ella’s favourite teddy,” I said, lifting it out and handing it to Laura. “Mr Ted.” I withdrew a dress and held it to my face, and the redolence of my dead daughter haunted me like a ghost. “And these are some drawings she made.” I lifted them from the box and passed them to Laura.
Two crude stick figures on a line of green grass, with a big yellow sun in the sky and the words Mummy and Daddy in clumsy stick-writing underneath.
Laura said, “How will I cope, if I couldn’t the first time?”
“You’ll have me,” I said. “We’ll cope together.”
She nodded, and reached out to me, and said, “Then, yes, of course. I love you, Ed.”
~
Three months later we sat in the bedroom and I held Laura as she wept. Over the long weeks she had had her past returned, little by little, and today we had left the Neuro-Tech clinic for the very last time.
Around us were the reminders of our daughter: photographs on the wall beside her stick-drawings; Mr Ted on the dresser, watching us.
Laura clung to me and wailed. “It’s so terrible!” she cried. “She was only five! My daughter! Ella...”
I wept with her. “I’m sorry. Laura, I’m so sorry.”
“We’ve lost our daughter!”
I held my wife. Together we relived the terrible moment of the accident, and we grieved.
The Disciples of Apollo
“I’m sorry...”
“How long?”
“At least six months, perhaps even as many as nine.”
“How will I know when...?”
“For two days beforehand you’ll feel drowsy, lethargic.”
“And pain?”
“I can assure you that your condition is quite painless.”
“I suppose I should be thankful for small mercies.”
“There is a retreat for sufferers of the Syndrome. Because of the highly unusual nature of the disease, you are advised to spend your final weeks there. Of course, you can go before then, if you wish. Your family will be able to visit you.”
“I have no family.”
“In that case Farrow Island might be perfect.”
~
Between the time of diagnosis and the actual realisation that he was going to die, Maitland passed through a period of disbelief. There is a difference between the intellectual knowledge of one’s eventual end, and the sudden sentence of death. Grief came one morning when he awoke and knew that his awakenings were numbered, and as he watched the dawn he realised that soon the sun would rise without his continued presence to witness it; grief filled his chest with nausea and suffocated him, and he turned like a loner in a crowd for someone on whom he might unburden his anguish and regret. There was no one, and this compounded his pain. At times in the past Maitland had managed to convince himself that he could do without the usual human involvements that most people took for granted. Yet now, with the imminence of his extinction, he realised that no one could live – or die – without having shared in some experience of affection, even love. He cursed himself for so aloofly denying down the years the inner voice that had cried out for human contact, cursed the coward in him that had shied from the trauma of new experience with the excuse that he had existed for so long without it... It came to him with the intensity of a cerebral scream that now it was too late. He had no chance of finding in six months that which had eluded him for a lifetime. He would die alone, as he had lived, and whereas to live alone was easy, to die alone, with so much guilt and remorse, and yearning for a somehow
altered
past, he knew would be beyond endurance.
~
Then, however, he passed through this phase of anger and entered a period of passive resignation, and he saw his death as the inevitable consequence of a life lived as he had lived it. He would gain nothing from regret, he told himself; his former self was a stranger whose actions he had no way of changing. He could only accept his fate, and anticipate anything that might lie beyond. He recalled the doctor’s recommendation, and made arrangements to leave.
In the following weeks Maitland said goodbye to his colleagues at the university, making the excuse that he was taking a short vacation. He sold his house and all his possessions, his books and his classical record collection. He felt a buoyant sense of relief when at last his house was empty. Since the diagnosis, he had been troubled at the thought of his material possessions remaining
in
situ
after his death, mocking him; it was as if the acquisitions of a lifetime somehow circumscribed the parameters of his physical existence, and would bear mute testimony to his non-existence when he died.
Spring came and Maitland left the mainland on the ferry to Farrow Island. On the crossing he attempted to determine how many of his fellow passengers were also suffering from the Syndrome. As far as he knew there were no outward, physical symptoms of the disease – the physiological debilitation was taking place on a sequestered, cellular level. Nevertheless, Maitland convinced himself that at least a dozen other passengers, of the twenty or so aboard the ferry, were making their way to the hospice. Their despondent postures and sapped facial expressions spoke to him of moribund futures, bitter presents and only guilt and regret in retrospect. He realised, as the ferry approached the island, that they were mirror images of himself.
A car was awaiting him on the cobbled quayside of the small fishing village. He was greeted by Dr Masters, the woman with whom he’d corresponded.
“Aren’t we waiting for the others?” he asked as he climbed into the rear of the car.
“Others?” Dr Masters regarded him with a smile. “The other passengers are Islanders. You are my only new resident this week.”
The hospice was a sixteenth-century mansion set in wooded parkland on a clifftop overlooking the straits. Dr Masters conducted him around the workshops and recreation rooms, the library and dining hall. She told him that the residents could take their meals in their rooms, if they wished, and that the recreational facilities and group therapy sessions were optional.
Maitland was thus reassured. The thirty or so residents he had seen so far in the mansion had about them a collective air of apathy, as if the fact of their ends had reached back and retroactively killed them in both body and in mind.
In contrast, Maitland had briefly glimpsed a few lone individuals in the grounds, striding out resolutely across the greensward, or posed in isolation on the windy clifftop. Maitland fancied that he detected something heroic in their lonely defiance in the face of death, and ultimately sad and tragic also.
As the weeks passed and Spring turned gradually to Summer, Maitland imposed his own routine on the identical days that stretched ahead to the time of his death in the New Year.
He would rise early and breakfast alone in the hall before setting out on a walk around the island that would often take him three or four hours. He would speak to no one, not because he wished to be rude or uncivil, but because no one ever spoke to him. He was a stranger on the island and therefore an ‘inmate’ up at the mansion, and the locals viewed the victims of the Syndrome with suspicion, sometimes even hostility.
He would take lunch in his room and eat it slowly, sometimes taking an hour to finish. Then he would sit by the window and read, or listen to the radio, until the gong announced the evening meal at seven.
This meal he did take with the other residents in the main hall, though he rarely joined in the conversation, which he found inane and self-pitying. There were constant debates as to the reason for the disease, and the only conclusion ever arrived at by the residents was that they were the chosen ones of their God, Apollo. These people, in Maitland’s opinion, were as irrational as the madmen who could no longer live with the thought of their deaths, and had to be removed to psychiatric units on the mainland.
One night, over coffee, Maitland decided that he had heard enough. He threw down his napkin and cleared his throat. The dozen residents at the table, the people Maitland considered to be the hard-core of the hospice’s strange religious movement, until now debating among themselves, fell silent and stared at him. They sensed his long-awaited contribution to the discussion.
“There is,” Maitland said, “no
reason
for what we have. It’s a freak, an accident, a cellular mutation. We are just as likely to be disciples of the Devil as we are to be the chosen ones of your God. In my opinion we are neither.”
Later, as he stood by the French windows and watched the sun fall behind the oaks across the river, he sensed someone beside him. “But how can you continue, Mr Maitland? How do you manage to live from day to day if you believe in nothing?”
Maitland could not reply, and retired to his room. He often wondered the same thing himself.
~
Summer gave way to Autumn, and the sunsets beyond the stand of oak turned the golden leaves molten. Maitland struck up an acquaintance with a fellow resident, a retired major who bored him with stories of his army life. The only reason Maitland tolerated his company was because he played a passable game of chess, and they would spend the long Autumn afternoons in the library, intent on the chequered board between them. They rarely spoke; that is, they rarely
conversed
. Maitland tried to ignore the major’s monologues, for he was contemplating – in contrast to the old soldier’s full and eventful life – the arid years of his own brief existence to date, his time at university, both as a student and later as a lecturer, and the missed opportunities he told himself he did not regret, but which, of course, he did.
The major’s going came about on the third week of their acquaintance. The old man had been complaining of headaches and tiredness for two days, and his concentration had often wandered from the game. Maitland realised what this meant, and he was unable to say whether he was shocked by the fact of the Major’s approaching death, or at the realisation, for the first time, that his own life too would end like this.
On the third day the major did not arrive, and Maitland sat alone by the window, his white pawn advanced to queen’s four in futile anticipation of the challenge.
He took to playing chess against himself in the empty afternoons that followed the major’s death. Winter came early that year, impinging on the territory that the calendar claimed still belonged to Autumn. Maitland found it too cold to enjoy his walks; the wind from the sea was bitter, and it often rained.
He appeared a lonely figure in the library, bent over the chessboard, apparently rapt in concentration but often, in reality, devising for himself an alternative set of events with which he wished he had filled his life. He repulsed all offers to challenge him, not with harsh or impolite words, but with a silent stare that frightened away would-be opponents with its freight of tragedy and regret.
One afternoon, during a storm that lashed and rattled the windows, Dr Masters joined Maitland in the library and tried to persuade him to take up her offer of group therapy, or at least counselling. They had experts who could...
He wanted to ask her if they had experts who could revise his past, give him the happiness he should have had long ago, but which had passed him by. He stopped himself before asking this, however. He knew that he had only himself to blame for the emptiness of his life.
Dr Masters said that she thought he should mix more with the other residents. Didn’t he know that, even now, nothing was as important or rewarding as human relationships?
And Maitland replied that he needed nothing, and never had, of
human
relationships
.
One week later he met Caroline.
~
He noticed her first one Sunday at the evening meal. She was at the far table by the blazing fire, and it was more than just her youth that set her apart from the other diners; she was
alive
in a way that none of the others were. Something in her manner, her movements, told Maitland that she could
not
be dying. Then he experienced a sudden stab of grief as he realised that her dynamism might be just a facade, an act to disguise her despair.
Later it came to him – with a sweeping sense of relief – that she was related to one of the residents and down here on a visit. Relatives came so infrequently – like the Islanders they saw the victims of the Syndrome as bizarre and freakish, as if the disease were some kind of curse, or could be transmitted – that it hadn’t occurred to him that this was what she was, the daughter or grand-daughter of one of the afflicted.
She excused herself from the table and Maitland watched her leave the room. Seconds later he saw her again through the window. She crossed the patio and ran across the greensward towards the clifftop. She wore moonboots, tight denims and a chunky red parka, and he guessed that she could be no more than twenty-five. Maitland had almost forgotten what it was like to feel such yearning, and to experience it now served only to remind him of his wasted years and the fact of his premature death.
In the morning Maitland went for a long walk through the wind and the rain. He returned, showered and ate lunch in his room and, feeling refreshed and invigorated, went downstairs to the library and played himself at chess.
In the middle of the afternoon he sensed someone beside him. He turned and saw the young woman.
She smiled. She was dressed as she was last night, with the addition of a yellow ski-cap pulled down over her ears, and mittens. Evidently she too had just returned from a walk.
“Can I give you a game?” she asked, indicating the board. Despite himself, Maitland smiled and began setting up the pieces.
They played for an hour with only the occasional comment, and then she looked up, directly at him, and said: “You’re not like the others. You’ve not given in...”
He wanted to tell her that he had surrendered long ago, that his resolution now in the face of death was nothing more than the cynicism that had fossilised his emotions years before.
Instead he smiled.
“I mean it,” she said, as she toppled her king in defeat. “There’s something about you...” She gestured. “The other fools have given in, one way or another – gone stark staring mad or joined that crackpot cult.”
She mistook his cynicism for valour, seeing him through eyes of youthful enthusiasm, and Maitland hated himself for the charlatan he knew himself to be.
He felt a sudden sympathy, then, with the residents who had taken to religion, or madness, as protection against the inevitable. At least they had had full and worthwhile lives against which to measure the futility and horror of their deaths.